South America Observations and Impressions

The aspect of the city was rather less affected than might have been expected. Some troops were moving about, here cavalry, there infantry. Few carriages or motor cars and few women were to be seen. Business was slack, and groups of men stood talking at street corners, evidently imparting to one another those tales and suspicions and guesses at unseen causes with which the air was thick. All water traffic from the opposite side of the bay had been stopped by the mutineers, who had also compelled the submission of one of the forts at the entrance. Strolling along to the great Botafogo Esplanade under the palms, I found a battery of field artillery, their guns pointed at the two battleships, the Minas and the São Paulo, against which they would, of course, have been as useless as paper pellets. There the majestic yellow grey monsters lay, fresh from Messrs. Armstrong's yard at Newcastle, flying the ensign of Brazil, but also flying at the fore the red flag of rebellion. So the day wore on, terror abating, but the sense of helplessness increasing. We were lunching at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – it was a small party, for considerations of safety had kept away the ladies who had been invited – when suddenly the heavy boom of the guns was heard, and continued at intervals all through the repast. When again in the streets, I found that the two Dreadnoughts were shelling some torpedo-boats, manned by crews still loyal, which had approached them. The practice was bad, and none of the boats was hit, but they prudently scurried off up the bay into shallow water where the ironclads could not follow.

So the hours passed and everybody was still asking, "What is to be done?" "The mutineers," so men said, "can't be starved out, because they have threatened to destroy the city if food is refused them, and the city is at their mercy. By this threat they have forced us to give them water. We cannot blow up the ships with torpedoes, first because they have stretched torpedo nets round the hulls, and secondly because it would be a serious thing to destroy property for which we have paid no small part of our annual revenue. Doesn't it look as if we should have to submit to the mutineers? What else can we do?" Later on the firing recommenced and I mounted to the third story of the British Consulate to see what was happening. The ships were shelling the naval barracks on the Isla das Cobras in the harbour, and the island was replying, and we were near enough to see the red flash from the iron lips just before the roar was heard. Lying out in the bay was the British liner by which we were to sail for Liverpool. The lighters that were carrying coal to her had been commandeered by the mutineers, but she had just enough in her bunkers to get to Bahia. The immediate difficulty was for the passengers to reach her across the line of fire. At last, however, a boat was sent out from shore bearing a flag of truce, and the São Paulo consented to cease firing and let the passengers get on board the British vessel. They were accordingly embarked in a launch which, flying the Consulate flag, crossed unharmed the danger zone. It was the only chance, but a sense of relief was visible in every face when we stepped on board, for if a negro gunner had been smitten by the desire to let fly once more at the Isla das Cobras, his ill-aimed shot might very well have sent the launch to the bottom. As we steamed slowly out to the ocean the magnificent São Paulo ran close alongside us, and we could see her decks crowded with negroes and the red flag still flying. "A study in black and red," someone observed. Outside the entrance were lying the Minas Geraes and the Bahia, partly to be out of harm's way from torpedoes, partly to guard the mouth of the bay. In the sober light of a grey sunset, the clouds hanging heavy on the Corcovado, but the lofty watch-tower of the Pan d'Azucar still visible through the gathering shades, we turned northward, and bade farewell to Rio. Two hours later, looking back through a moonless night, we could still see the flash, from beneath the horizon, of the searchlights which the Minas Geraes was casting on the sea all round her to guard against the stealthy approach of a loyal torpedo-boat.

A few days later, at Pernambuco, we heard that peace had been restored. The Chambers had voted an amnesty with eloquent speeches about the beauty of forgiveness, and had promised to redress the grievances of the mutineers. Another mutiny broke out afterwards, which, after many lives had been lost, was severely suppressed, but these later events happened when we were far away, nearing the coast of Europe, and of them I have nothing to tell.

The coast for some way north from Rio continues high, but the steamers keep too far out to permit its beauties to be seen. Before one approaches Bahia, the mountains have receded, and at that city, though picturesque heights are still visible, they lie further back, and scarcely figure in the landscape. Still further north, towards Pernambuco, and most of the way northwestward to Pará, the coast is much lower. The bay of Bahia is singularly beautiful in its vast sweep, as well as in the verdure that fringes its inlets, and the glimpses of distant sunlit hills. Nor is the city, long the capital of Brazil, wanting in interest; for, though none of the buildings have much architectural merit, there is a quaint, old-fashioned look about the streets and squares, with many a house that has stood unchanged since the eighteenth century. The upper city runs along the edge of a steep bluff, sixty or eighty feet above the lower town, which is a single line of street, even more dirty than it is picturesque, occupying the narrow strip between the harbour and the cliff. Here, far more than in Parisianized Rio, one finds the familiar features of a Portuguese town reproduced, irregular and narrow streets, houses, often high, roofed with red tiles, and coloured with all sorts of washes, pink, green, blue, and yellow. Sometimes the whole front or side of a house is covered with blue or yellowish brown tiles, a characteristic of Portuguese cities – it is frequent in Oporto and Braga – which has come down from Moorish times. But a still greater contrast between this and southern Brazil is found in the population. In São Paulo there are few negroes, in Rio not very many, but here in Bahia all the town seems black. One might be in Africa or the West Indies. It is the same in Pernambuco and indeed all the way to the mouth of the Amazon.

Finding this to be a region filled with coloured people as São Paulo was with white people, and knowing that a thousand miles further west one would come into a region entirely Indian, one began to realize what a vast country Brazil is, big enough to be carved up into sixteen countries each as large as France. Were there natural boundaries, i. e. such physical features as mountain ranges or deserts, to divide this immense region into sections, the settled parts of Brazil might before now have split apart into different political communities. As it is, however, there are no such natural dividing lines, and if the Republic should ever break in pieces it will be differences in the character of the population or some conflict of material interests that will bring this about.

How has it happened that so huge a country has fallen to the lot of a people so much too small for it, since one can hardly reckon the true Brazilian white nation at more than seven millions?

What did happen was that the French, English, and Dutch, having their hands full in Europe, did not pursue their attempts to occupy the country with sufficient persistence and with adequate forces, and so lost their hold on the parts they had seized. Thus it became possible for a handful of Portuguese on the Atlantic coast to send out small colonizing parties into their unoccupied Hinterland, and as there were no civilized inhabitants to resist them, to go on acquiring a title to it without opposition until they met the outposts of the Spanish government who had advanced from the Pacific across the Andes just as the Portuguese had advanced from the Atlantic. Neither Portuguese nor Spaniards had been numerous enough to colonize this interior region of the continent, so it remains (save for a few trading posts on the rivers) an empty wilderness.

Nevertheless, though Brazil is physically all one country, it contains regions differing in climate, in economic resources, and in population. I will try in a few sentences to indicate the character of each.

The most northerly part along the frontiers of Guiana and also along a good deal of the coast between the mouth of the Amazon and Cape St. Roque is the least valuable, for large tracts are stony and protracted droughts are not uncommon. The extreme north has been hardly at all settled.

The east central part, consisting of the mountain ridges and table-lands referred to on page 368, together with slopes which descend on all sides from these highlands, is a region of great natural resources where all tropical crops and fruits can be produced. Most of it is healthy, much of it not too hot for white men to work and thrive, and the magnificent forests, no less than the mines, will make the mountains for many years to come no less a source of wealth than are the more level tracts. Its weak point is the want of white labour and the inefficiency of black labour.

This tropical region passes imperceptibly into the temperate country which occupies the states of São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catharina, and Rio Grande, a section of the country no less fertile than the last and better fitted for European constitutions. Here all sub-tropical products can be raised; here also are forests; and here, where the land has not yet been brought under tillage, there is abundant and excellent pasture for all sorts of live stock. As the east central region is the land of cotton and sugar, so this southern region is the land of coffee and cattle, – coffee in its northerly parts, cattle and the cereals in its southern.

There remain the vast spaces of the west and northwest, still so imperfectly explored that it is hard to estimate their economic value. To the Amazonian forests, the Selvas, I shall return in another chapter.97 They are the land of another great Brazilian staple – rubber. Most parts of the region where Brazil adjoins Bolivia, a vast level or slightly undulating country, partly grassy, partly covered with wood or scrub, is believed to be available either for cultivation or for ranching. At present access is difficult, and markets are far away, but when the districts of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina that lie between this region and the coast have been more fully settled, its turn will come.

Taking Brazil as a whole, no great country in the world owned by a European race possesses so large a proportion of land available for the support of human life and productive industry. In the United States there are deserts, and of the gigantic Russian Empire much is desert, and much is frozen waste. But on the Portuguese of Brazil nature has bestowed nothing for which man cannot find a use. Such a possession as this was far more than enough to compensate the little kingdom for the loss of the empire which it began in the sixteenth century to build up in India, before the evil days came after the death of King Sebastian.

The material prosperity of a country, however, depends less on its natural resources than on the quality of the labour applied to its development and on the intelligence that directs the labour. In these respects Brazil has been less fortunate. When the Portuguese first settled the coast lands, they forced the Indian aborigines to work for them, and in many places destroyed by their severities the bulk of the native population. Negroes began to be imported about A.D. 1600, but not in great numbers until the discovery of diamond and other mines in the inland country created a sudden demand for labour. After that, there came a large importation of slaves, for agricultural as well as for mining purposes, from all the Portuguese dominions of Africa, and from the Congo regions; and this went on, though latterly much reduced, down to our own time. Between 1825 and 1850 it is said that 1,250,000 slaves were landed, and cargoes came in even later. Thus the working population of the tropical region, including the coast towns, became largely, and in the north, predominantly negro. Slavery was abolished by successive stages, the last of which was reached in 1888. For a time the plantation culture was disorganized, but most of the freedmen ultimately returned to work. It is by their labour that sugar and cotton are raised to-day, though they take life very easily, and often content themselves with just so much exertion on just so many days a week as is needed to provide them with food and the other scanty necessaries of their life. Here, as elsewhere, the race is lighthearted and thoughtless, caring little for the future, loving amusement in its most childish forms. It is kindly and submissive, but dangerously excitable, and quickly demoralized by drink. The planters find it hard to count on their work people, who stay away if they feel more than usually lazy, and will, if displeased, transfer themselves to another planter, who, in the general scarcity of labour, is glad to have them. Many children are born to them, but many die, especially in infancy, so that, taking the country as a whole, they do not seem to increase faster than the other sections of the population.

Such are the cotton and sugar regions: now let us turn to those southerly states of the republic, whose staples are coffee and cattle and cereals. In them, and especially in São Paulo and Rio Grande, the conditions are altogether different. The number of negroes was never large there, and it does not grow. Owing to the elevation of the ground and to the less powerful sun, the heat is not excessive in either state, and European immigrants can work and thrive and be happy. So Europeans have flocked hither. Between 1843 and 1859 about twenty thousand came from Germany to Rio Grande do Sul, and there are now, it is said, about two hundred thousand, forming a compact community which preserves its national habits and manages its own affairs with little interference by the central government. It is, in fact, disposed to resent any such interference and to "run things" in its own solid German way. Even larger is the number of Italians who in more recent years have entered these southern states. The labour on the great coffee estates of São Paulo is almost entirely Italian; and in Rio Grande they have become well-to-do peasant proprietors, living in less comfort than their German neighbours, but working just as steadily. This better quality of population has largely gone to making the southern states the most progressive part of Brazil. Should the Italians and the native Brazilians of the south, who have far less negro blood than those of the middle states, continue to spread themselves out as settlers over the still thinly peopled southwestern districts, they will probably give prosperity to that region also. Cattle ranching is in the south carried on by Gauchos much like those of Uruguay or Argentina. They are said to have communicated their love of horses to the Germans and Italians, so that on holidays even the women of those races appear on horseback in a way that would startle their peasant cousins left at home in Swabia or Lombardy.

The foreign element in Brazil is more important by its energy and industry than by its numbers, for it probably little exceeds a million all told, and the total population of the republic may approach nineteen or twenty millions. In 1910 about 88,000 immigrants entered, most of them Italians, and the rest Portuguese, Spaniards, and Syrians, these last mostly travelling peddlers, or small dealers who establish themselves in the towns. The afflux of Syrians that has found its way to South America and the West Indies during the last few years is a new and curious feature in the currents of ethnic movement that mark our time.

But what of the Brazilian people itself? The influences that tend to make it vary from its original type are counterworked by the steady immigration from Portugal, and from Spain also, for though any sort of Spaniard (except a Gallego) differs materially from a Portuguese, the two races differ much less from one another than either does from any other European stock. The Brazilian is primarily a Portuguese in the outlines of his mind and character. He has, however, been modified by intermixture with two other races. The first of these is the native Indian. The settlers both in São Paulo and along the northeastern coast, while they killed most of the Indian men either in fight or by working them to death as slaves, intermarried freely with Indian women. The offspring were called Mamelucos, an Eastern term which it is odd to find here, and which is now beginning to pass out of use. In the south this mixed race as well as the pure Indian race has been now absorbed into the rest of the population.98 You would as soon expect to see a Pawnee in Philadelphia as an Indian in Santos. In the north the half-breed is generally called a Caboclo, a name originally given to the tame native Indian, as opposed to the wild Indio bravo; and in that region, a large part of the agricultural population is of this mixed stock.

The second modifying influence is that of the imported Africans. When the first slave ships disgorged their cargoes on the Atlantic coast, the aborigines of those districts had already been either killed off or merged in the Portuguese population, so that the mingling of Indian and negro blood which is supposed to produce an especially undesirable class of citizens was comparatively small. The intermarriage of blacks and whites has, however, gone on apace, and the negroes constitute a large, the mulattoes and quadroons a still larger, percentage of the population. Some observers hold that the coloured people, taken all together, equal or outnumber the whites. The intermixture continues, for here, as in Portuguese East Africa, no sentiment of race repulsion opposes it.99 Any figures that might be given would be quite conjectural; for the line between the mixed black and white and the white cannot be drawn with any approach to accuracy. Even in the United States, where conditions permit more careful discrimination, no one can tell what is the percentage of mulattoes to the total coloured population, nor how many quadroons and octoroons there are to be found among those classed as whites, for many people who have some negro blood succeed in concealing its presence, while others are classed as coloured who in Europe would pass as white. Much more difficult is it to tell in Brazil who is to be deemed a person of colour.

How far the differences between the Brazilian and the Portuguese of to-day are due to racial admixture, and how far to the conditions of colonial life and a new physical environment, is a matter on which one might speculate for ever and come no nearer to a conclusion. The descendants of Englishmen who were living in Massachusetts and Virginia in 1840 before immigration from Continental Europe had begun to affect the English stock shewed already marked differences from the Englishmen of old England, and it is impossible to tell how far the changes that have passed on the people of the United States since then are due to the influx of new immigrants from Europe, how far to other causes. The Brazilian is still more of a Portuguese than he is of any other type. His ideas and tastes, his ways of life, his alternations of listlessness and activity, his kindly good nature, his susceptibility to emotions and to a rhetoric that can rouse emotion, belong to the country whence he came.

Brazil was the latest country in the American continent to become a republic. This befell in 1888. In 1807, when the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte entered Portugal, the then reigning king, John, of the house of Braganza, crossed the Atlantic and reigned at Rio till the expulsion of the French enabled him to resume his European throne. In 1822 the people had become discontented under Portuguese misgovernment. Republican ideas, stimulated by the destruction of Spanish power that was proceeding on the Pacific coasts, were in the air, and the Regent, Dom Pedro, son of King John, proclaimed the independence of Brazil which was, after some fighting, conceded by the mother country in 1825. His action probably saved monarchical institutions, and when he abdicated in 1831, disgusted with the difficulties that surrounded him, and with the unpopularity to which his own faults had exposed him, he was succeeded by his son, who ruled as the Emperor Pedro the Second. This amiable and enlightened prince, a lover of natural science as well as of art and letters, devoted himself chiefly to European travel and to the economic and educational improvement of his country, interfering very little with politics. A military conspiracy and the resentment of the planters at the sudden abolition of slavery brought about the revolution of 1888, in which a republic was proclaimed and the Emperor shipped off to Europe. In 1891 a congress met and enacted a federal constitution modelled on that of the United States. The immense size of the country and its want of homogeneity suggested a federal system, the basis for which already existed in the legislative assemblies of the provinces. Since then Brazil has had its full share of armed risings and civil wars.

At first the states were allowed the full exercise of the large functions which the Constitution allotted to them, including the raising of revenue by duties on exports and the maintenance of a police force which in some states was undistinguishable from an army. Presently attempts were made to draw the reins tighter, and these attempts have continued till now. The national government has at its disposal the important field of financial and tariff legislation, the control of army and navy, and the opportunities of helping needy or slothful states by grants of money or by the execution of public works. Through the use of these powers it has latterly endeavoured to exert over the states a greater control than some of them seem willing to accept. Nor is this the only difficulty. While some of the states, and especially the southern, have an intelligent and energetic population, others remain far behind, their citizens too ignorant and lazy, or too unstable and emotional, to be fit for self-government. Universal suffrage in districts where the majority of the voters are illiterate persons of colour suggests, if it does not justify, extra-legal methods of handling elections. One illegality breeds another, and there is perpetuated a distrust of authority and a resort to violence. As one of the most recent and brilliant of European travelers100 observes, in a passage which conveys his admiration for the attractive qualities he finds in the Brazilians, "The Constitution enjoys a chiefly theoretic authority… There is a lack of balance between the states which have already a highly perfected civilization and the districts which in theory are on a footing of equality, but whose black or Indian population can only permit of a nominal democracy stained by those irresponsible outbursts which characterize primitive humanity." That the authority of a constitution should be "theoretic rather than practical" must be expected where "a democracy is nominal"; for if institutions the working of which requires intelligence and public spirit are forced on Indians and negroes, their failure is inevitable.

In the Brazilian politics of to-day there are many factions, but no organized parties nor any definite principles or policies advocated by any group or groups of men. Federal issues are crossed and warped by state issues, state issues confused by federal issues, and both sets of issues turn rather on persons than on general doctrines or specific practical proposals. One source of dissension is, however, absent, – that struggle of the church and clericalism against the principles of religious equality which has distracted the Spanish-American republics. In Brazil the separation of church and state is complete, and though the diplomatic corps enjoys the presence of a papal Nuncio as one of its members, this adherence to tradition has no present political significance. Here, moreover, as in Argentina and Uruguay, the church and religion seem to have little influence upon the thought or the conduct of laymen. The absence or the fluidity of parties makes the executive stronger than the legislature both in national and state politics. There are many men of talent, especially oratorical talent, and many men of force, but not enough who shew constructive power and the grasp of mind needed to handle the enormous economic problems which a country so vast, so rich, and so various presents.